Doctors: The False-Note Medical Drama Requires Tremendous Effort To Watch

SAHIR RAZA'S show Doctors might be the most non-committal medical drama in the Indian streaming space right now. But that is not the surprising bit. What is surprising is that it took an army of five writers to come up with a ten-episode series that feels like twenty and with every passing minute sucks the life out of those watching it. I don’t say it lightly but I am certain that watching Doctors required more effort than making it.

Reasons for making this observation are plenty. Let’s start with the most obvious one. The plot in the outing is so sketchy that dismissing that as jumpy would be an understatement, almost a praise. The makers have put together a host of doctors, some new entrants and other seniors, and the most obvious way they go about their interpersonal relationships is by making them fall in love with each other. Even Netflix's Indian Matchmaking tried harder.

Doctors centres around a group of medical practitioners at a multispeciality hospital called EMC. The outline is fairly straightforward. Patients flow in and the doctors treat them. But there is one catch. Among the fresh batch is Nitya (Harleen Sethi) who has come with revenge on her mind. A couple of years back, resident neurosurgeon Ishaan Ahuja (Kelkar) had botched up the surgery of her brother, also a neurosurgeon, Dhaval’s (Ali) operation. This damaged his hands and derailed his practice. Nitya thus comes to EMC with the vaguest of plans and then two episodes later, absolutely out of nowhere, falls in love with Ishaan.

The year is ending and I have seen multiple wild twists by now but this tops the list. The sweeping swerve is so random that I went back to check if I missed a couple of episodes in between. Not only had I not done it but it turns out that this was a precedent for the show at large. Here are some examples: A young doctor has a meltdown and in the next moment, he is in the psychic ward; a patient’s family threatens the doctors for wanting to take off the life support. In the next scene, they are already in the court? Another sombre female doctor goes about her task little she has no heart. Doctors reveals the backstory through one phone call. Her sister calls and she snaps at her. No, she says, she will not talk to her father because he had supported when she was abused by her uncle. This is the first time we see her talking to her family.

Doctors incompetence hurts more because Nikkhil Advani’s excellent Mumbai Diaries, also a medical drama, has set the bar too high. In many ways, Advani’s show serves as a compelling reference point for understanding the shortcomings of a series like Doctors. The 2021 series unfolded with an organic urgency. The spatial geography of the hospital was rooted in the city of Mumbai that fed into the crises — perpetually exhausted doctors, terrorist attacks and natural disasters — without stressing anything aloud. On the contrary, one would be hard-pressed to determine the city in which the swanky EMC is situated and given the affluence of the place and the flush amenities, it matters little to the human tragedies depicted across the episodes.

It also does not help that the filmmaking is one of the worst there is on streaming today. Every exigency springs from an acute sense of falsity that makes it impossible to care. The emergencies are as accidental as “a helicopter crash”, “an accident of a cricketer” “a shoot out at a police station”. They could happen anywhere and frankly the excess lends them an embellishment of inaccuracy.

The actors keep up with the evasive writing. No one sticks out (Niharika Lyra Dutt is watchable but her first-bencher energy is similar to her role in Call Me Bae) and by the third episode, the drama moves entirely away from the hospital beds. A couple of hours later it does return, but by then the incompetence of the doctors and Doctors had melded into one.

Doctors is currently streaming on JioCinema.